Computerworld - November 21, 2011

professional development programs. And they might be the first to be laid off and the last to be hired.

As a result, they may be hit harder by the recession. According to recent U.S. government data, unemployment rates for older I T professionals have increased more quickly than the rates for younger tech workers since the recession began some three years ago (see chart, page 24).

All of that can add up to a tough road for older people in high tech.

Age bias is “something that no [employer] talks about. But it’s a reality in tech that if you’re 45 years of age and still writing C code or Cobol code and making $150,000 a year, the likelihood is that you won’t be employed very long,” says Vivek Wadhwa, who currently holds academic positions at several universities, including UC Berkeley, Duke and Harvard.

As Wadhwa’s observation indicates, “age bias” is a simplistic label
for a complicated set of factors that influence the job prospects for
senior tech employees. When considering workers over the age of
50, employers take the following factors into account:
While none of these generalizations is necessarily true for any
particular candidate, each is a stereotypical assumption about
older workers. What’s more, they are all logical and legal reasons
for an employer to fire, or not hire, someone.

“If you can hire someone fresh out of college for $60,000 who is likely to know the latest technology, or you can hire someone 45 years old who’s making $140,000, who are you going to hire? That’s the harsh reality, whether we like it or not,” says Wadhwa, 53, who started his career in IT as a programmer and then went on to be an entrepreneur before entering academia.

Robert Ayr hears that message loud and clear. At 57, he’s fully and happily employed in IT as the manager of production services at Irving, Texas-based VHA Inc., a national network of not-for-profit healthcare organizations. He gives himself credit for managing his career well through turbulent times, but at the same time, he can’t help but look over his shoulder.

By his own estimate, since graduating college in 1977, Ayr has held nine or 10 technology positions all over the country — in California, Massachusetts, Texas and New York. “ Especially in the beginning, I was moving all

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over the place — to expand my knowledge base and to further my career,” he says.

As he got older, he moved less and
stayed in positions longer, but always took
care to keep his skills fresh, moving from
mainframes to VMS to his current spe-
cialty — servers. “I say every 10 years it’s
time to retool,” he explains. “I keep trying
to learn as much as I can, otherwise you
become a dinosaur.”
Even so, Ayr acknowledges that the
climate begins to change as the years of
experience add up. He recalls when he was
passed over for a job years ago in favor of a
candidate who had nearly the same creden-
tials as he did but was 20 years younger.

“I ran into the guy a couple months later
at a users’ group meeting, and I asked him
right up front what kind of money they were paying him. The
bottom line is, he was willing to work for less. That’s what happens.”
“I was always the youngest person wherever I went; now I’m one
of the oldest,” Ayr says. “You still picture yourself as the 30-year-old
hotshot, but the reality is you’re not that guy anymore.”

You still picture
yourself as the
30-year-old hotshot,
but the reality is you’re
not that guy anymore.

ROBERT AYR, MANAGER OF
PRODUCTION SERVICES, VHA INC.

Older Workers by the Numbers

What do we know about the aging workforce in the U.S., and about older tech workers in particular?

For starters, more older Americans are remaining in the overall workforce. Last year, the percentage of people aged 55 and older in the workforce reached 40%, its highest level in 35 years, according to a study published in February 2011 by the Employee Benefit Research Institute. And that’s after the 2008-2009 recession, when many older workers lost their jobs.

But are older IT professionals remaining in the workforce? Solid numbers are difficult to find; the data that is available is sparse and sometimes inconsistent. Studies of older workers rarely break down results by profession. Recruiting firms offer data on hiring, and sometimes on salaries, by profession, but they typically don’t break it down by age.

Other studies track unemployment, but not by age or profes-
sion — so it’s difficult to know how many older IT professionals
want work but can’t find it. The picture is further blurred when
companies outsource and offshore
IT jobs, or import workers through
the H-1B and other visa programs —
potentially displacing U.S. workers,
including older employees.
Add the fact that some I T profes-
sionals voluntarily bail out at a
certain age, either to pursue new
careers or to start their own business-
es, and you can see why researchers
find it difficult to quantify trends.
One set of data that does bring
several of these factors together
comes from the U. S. Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS). The agency released
numbers in early 2011 that show that
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